Per una storia incrociata tra l’Italia e la Libia: Il percorso dell’etnologa e arabista Ester Panetta (1894-1983)

This paper is a contribution to the entangled history between Italy and Libya through the trajectory life of Ester Panetta (1894-1983), a leading scholar who devoted her life to develop the knowledge of the language, history and cultures of Libya. After her Arabic and colonial studies at the Oriental Institutes in Naples and in Paris, she lived in Libya until the outbreak of the Second World War when she definitively came back to Italy. Her experience as single woman in colonial lands is not isolated at all, as the stories of single women crossing the territory of the Empire as travellers, teachers and missionaries testify.